A Good Day (written Nov 22)

Today we had a brief language session in the morning, then all four of the trainees in our village headed to our garden to start planting.

One of our assignments from Peace Corps is to start a small community garden and we got a great fenced area near the school and pump for ours. It even has a cashew tree for shade! The school has had a garden there in the past and the school headmaster and the director of the agriculture program are very excited about it. So far we dug six beds and two compost pits. This morning we planted two nursery beds with carrots, eggplant, tomatoes, and some kind of squash. We also planted half a regular bed with carrots – we will plant the other half with okra once we've had a chance to soak the seeds. We're all very excited about our garden and can't wait for things to start coming up! Oh and we also made an awesome scarecrow to discourage hungry birds. Scarecrows are not common here, so we're pretty sure the locals think us toubabs are even more crazy than before now :-)

Here are some pictures of the garden I took when we were digging the gardens:

Garden beds

Compost pits

Scarecrow

Some of our local helpers

After a quick lunch of bean sandwiches (our first bread and beans since arriving in our village!), we got our bikes and started off down the road to a mixed Wolof/Pulaar village nearby that has seven trainees. After an hour-long hot, sandy, dusty ride, we arrived in the village with a new appreciation for the difficulty of riding bikes in the sand. Definitely an acquired skill! The trainees there gave us a very warm welcome and a tour of their small village. It's maybe 1/10 the size of our village and much more rural (complete with mud huts with thatched roofs), so it was quite a contrast to what we've grown used to in our village. It was very interesting and great to see the other trainees! After a great visit we headed back home and found the return ride much easier and quicker and cooler. I feel like I got the hand of sand riding pretty quickly and look forward to riding more in the future.

Tomorrow we're off to the Peace Corps training camp for language and technical training, so more to come on that later...